Home Installations

Not long after Prospect.1 opened, the Houston Chronicle's art
writer, Douglas Britt, ran some photos in his "Arts in Houston" blog
with the comment: "There was some terrific art at the conventional
sites, but what really made this biennial special was the site-specific
installations in the Lower 9th Ward." Others have said as much for the
city overall, but the Lower Ninth really is special — not because
of the destruction, but for the sense you get on a quiet, sunny day in
Holy Cross that this may be the most soulful neighborhood in America.
Traces of things hauntingly poetic coexist with the damage and decay,
but the biennial is the main attraction, and trying to find all the
sites by car can pose some navigational challenges. What follows are a
few tips for finding your way around, as well as some commentary on the
installations themselves.

The first step is to get to the L9 Center for the Arts (539 Caffin
Ave.). On one side is Anne Deleporte's ethereal Editorial Blue
collage mural, and the other side features Keith Calhoun and Chandra
McCormick's eloquent photographs of local street life culled from what
they could salvage of their three decades worth of work after the
storm.

On a nearby table are Prospect.1's free and very helpful maps of its
site-specific installations in the area, and this map is really the
only way to find them by car because the larger official map lacks the
necessary street information.

Catercorner from the L9 Center is Wangechi Mutu's Miss Sarah's
House, a skeletal frame where Sarah Lastie's house once stood.
Luminous at twilight, it's essentially a visualization that will
hopefully lead to its restoration.

The next stop is the nearby Tekrema Center (5640 Burgundy St.), a
one-time hardware store that now houses a mysterious installation by
Chilean artist Sebastián Preece. Like an odd archeological dig,
it features concrete slabs turned upside down, or replaced with other
concrete slabs to reveal secret topologies or obscure geopsychic
excavations. Upstairs, the walls are covered in Louisiana swamp murals
by New York painter Adam Cvijanovic, which are upstaged by the house
itself, a time warp filled with the spirits of its former inhabitants
and their assorted relics, some of which remain on a mantle in the form
of old turpentine and mouthwash bottles, a battered crucifix and a
calendar page from February 1924. More problematic is a house (5418
Dauphine St.) transformed by the talented German artist Katharina
Grosse into a fiery expressionist painting. Such tactics work well in
soulless urban environments but can seem tone deaf in this most soulful
of neighborhoods.

While Mark Bradford's house-size ark (2201 Caffin Ave.) is well
known, Miguel Palma's Rescue Games piece at the Lower Ninth Ward
Village (1001 Charbonnet St.) is no less monumental. A life-size
recreation of a World War II Higgins landing craft, it holds a shallow
sea of water that becomes a tidal surge when the craft lurches to and
fro on hydraulic pistons as the eerie soundtrack from Janine Antoni's
video of horrified eyes and wrecking balls emanates from the next
room.

The flood ravaged Battleground Baptist Church (2200 Flood St.) holds
Nari Ward's Diamond Gym sculpture. A skeletal diamond-shaped
steel cage filled with gym equipment surrounded by mirrors, it makes an
inexplicably powerful statement to the accompaniment of famous Civil
Rights-era sermons. Robin Rhode's simple fountain in the shell of a
former playground structure (2500 Caffin Ave.) is meditative when the
water's turned on, but almost disappears when it's not. Finally,
Argentine artist Leandro Ehrlich's great Window and Ladder
sculpture (1800 Deslonde St.) serendipitously takes us to the new Brad
Pitt houses and the old Common Ground compound, where Egyptian artist
Ghada Amer's spindly Happily Ever After metal sculpture suggests
the fragility of such glad tidings. With regard to the Lower Ninth
Ward, we can only hope it's a prophecy.

click to enlarge

Adam Cvijanovic's swamp murals at the Tekrema Center share space with the assorted relics of the antique structure's former inhabitants.